The poetics of automatism: Poetry, media, and the nineteenth-century body

From the Romantic fascination with possession to the turn-of-the-century mania for automatic writing, British poetry in the nineteenth century appears to be oddly involuntary, out of control of its producers. Yet what is even more striking is that this involuntariness, this automatism, is deeply embodied. My dissertation investigates the ways in which nineteenth-century readers and writers are not, in fact, intellectual agents of language; instead, poetry is imagined to promote in them involuntary responses that enlist the body as a medium for its reproduction. "The Poetics of Automatism" examines a wide variety of texts---including the poetry and prose of Coleridge, Tennyson, Browning, Kipling, and others; the poetic theory of Wordsworth, Hazlitt, Hallam, and Eliot; and nineteenth-century writings on physiology and psychology---in order to investigate the ways in which poetry was imagined to engage the body's automatic responses to media and mediation.